20 Things You Must STOP Doing Today If You Want To Be Successful (Pt. 1)

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If you are striving to obtain success in life, eliminating certain unproductive behaviours and mindsets is imperative.

Before we start layering the beneficial habits, it is required to eradicate any unhelpful or even unproductive ones.

In this post, I will be discussing 20 things that you need to stop doing as soon as possible if you wish to become successful in business and life in general (the principles apply to pretty much any field).

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1) Trading time for money

If you are a regular reader, then this should not come as a surprise.

One of the most fundamental pillars of success is being compensated based on the amount of value you provide, and not the amount of time you have spent working on something.

Your time is limited and capped, both within a specific day, but more importantly, during your lifetime.

As a direct result, working for someone else on an hourly basis is one of the most inefficient things to do.

This shows amazing discipline but also a deep understanding of how money and capital works.

3) “Helping” others before you have helped yourself

Helping people is noble. Humans are wired to take pleasure by helping fellow humans; it is written in our DNA.

However, this benevolence needs to come from a position of abundance.

Think about it.

What is better? To deviate your focus from becoming successful in order to assist a small group of people that might ask for your help (and never use it), or first become successful and then have the resources to help much more people, with more efficiency and potency?

This is exactly the case of Warren Buffett. In 2006 Buffett donated the bulk of his fortune the Gates foundation to fight disease and reduce inequity.

Humans are social animals. For evolutionary reasons, we care deeply about what other people think of us.

Unfortunately, this creates a huge problem in modern society.

Many people are hesitant to commit on their venture because they are afraid of being criticized by their peers for their idea or effort.

Even worse, they are scared that if their attempt fails, they will be humiliated.

Listen. The opinion of random, non-successful people should be irrelevant to you.

If you are not convinced by me, read the thoughts of one of the most successful entrepreneurs that have lived, Felix Dennis:

“If you wish to be rich, you must grow a carapace. A mental armour. Not so thick as to blind you to well-constructed criticism and advice, especially from those you trust. Nor so thick as to cut you off from friends and family.

But thick enough to shrug off the inevitable sniggering and malicious mockery that will follow your inevitable failures. Not to mention the poorly hidden envy that will accompany your eventual success.”

6) Taking advice from clueless people

One of the most irrational things I have encountered is that incompetent people will be sharing advice (unsolicited advice, most of the times), when in fact they have no clue what they are talking about.

“In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.”

You definitely have come across a person that fits that description.

It is the guy that yells, “I will tell you how to make money”, yet it is painfully obvious that he has NOT made any money, and that he is not going to, anytime soon.

To wrap this up:

Would you take weight-loss advice from obese people? Probably not. Same thing for success.

7) Thinking for the short-term

Another field that our own biology and evolution fails us. Humans have evolved to optimize for the short term.

Our ancestors were not thinking long into the future.

Why? Because that future might not even come.

It was much more useful to think about the short term. Example: what the hell am I going to eat tomorrow?

In modern times though, it is absolutely critical to plan for the long-term.

2 Comments

I understand trading time for money can be limiting but I traded my time to my corporate 9 to 5 for over $200 per hour the last year before I slightly early retired. While many entrepenuers make more than I did they only represent a tiny fraction of the whole community so I honestly think if you are a high earner you might be better off making that trade. Do you think even with high earners they should stop that trade and go out on their own?

The two biggest one is the lack of control and the fact that no asset value is generated. I elaborate more in the past.

Regarding whether high earners should go out on their own, I can’t provide a definitive answer because it depends on who that person is, what is his current status in life and what are his aspirations.

Check the article above, I think it provides some solid points. Thanks again for commenting!